Framing Science
Advances in theory and technology are fueling a new era in the science of persuasion
By
Christy Nicholson
In
1998, a national $206 billion lawsuit settled against four tobacco companies,
the Master Settlement Agreement, provided the funding to launch a series of
anti-smoking television commercials. This series, called the "truth,"
launched in 2000 and became one of the largest and most effective anti-smoking
campaigns in American history. Out of nearly 100 ads in the series, which still
continues today, a 30-second spot called "Body Bags" stands out.
Here's
the scene: Vans pull up outside the corporate offices of an unnamed tobacco
company. Teenagers pile out, dragging body bags and dumping them on the
sidewalk in front of the offices; 1,200 body bags, the ad tells us. A teen
shouts into a loudspeaker: "Do you know how many people tobacco kills
every day?" The camera catches a curious corporate suit peering out the
window to the kids below. "You know what?" the teen says looking up,
"We're going to leave these here for you, so you can see what 1,200 people
actually look like." Cut to an overhead shot of the body bags covering two
city blocks. Sound of wind blowing. Fade to black.
Around
the same time that this commercial aired, Philip Morris decided to launch its
own series of anti-smoking ads geared to youth. Their ads, which featured
clean-cut, dutiful looking teens, gave a simple and clear message: "Think.
Don't Smoke."
The
"truth" ads have been enormously successful and the Philip Morris ads
were a total flop (at least in terms of public health; whether in that failure
they succeeded in advancing the company's corporate health is for another
time). Research by Matthew Farrelly, director of the Public Health Research
Program at Research Triangle Park, published in the American Journal of
Public Health in 2002, showed that teens who saw the "truth"
commercials were 66 percent less inclined smoke and those who saw the
"Think. Don't Smoke." campaign, were 36 percent more inclined to
smoke (see above comment).
While
no formal study parsed the magic ingredients that made one ad work and the
other "fail," many communication experts, and lay people for that
matter, saw some obvious characteristics. The "truth" simply tapped
into what motivates teenagers. An ad that has a slight anarchistic vibe, with a
message that goes up against big corporations, all packaged in a fast-paced,
gritty and edgy film clip, will catch the eye of rebellious teens. The Philip
Morris ad, on the other hand, tells the teens, in a lecturing manner, to do
something no free-spirited emotional teen wants to do: "think." You
can almost see teenagers rolling their eyes.
But
is it the match of the teen personality with the imagery in the "Body
Bags" ad that makes it so effective? Or is it the fast editing cuts, the
tee shirts they wore, the words "body bag," or even the negative
frame of death? No one can say for sure.
"The
field doesn't have a consensus on messaging," says Noel Brewer, University
of North Carolina. "We know some of the rules, but most are
disconnected."
"If
the principles of psychology were a series of main effects - meaning that x works
better than y - rather than more qualified statements that reflect interactions
between variables, then we wouldn't need a science of human behavior to deduce
them," explains Peter Salovey, Yale University. "They'd be
obvious."
So
scientists study the seemingly infinite number of interdependent variables that
affect persuasive messaging. Of course, there are some well-known
characteristics. First, a message needs to grab attention. It must also be easy
to understand so the audience actually "gets" it. Beyond that, the
content must be personally relevant and give the viewers reason to think or
talk about it. Ultimately though, none of this signals success until the
audience is motivated and has the means to act. And all the while, these
requirements must be interwoven with a person's cultural, social, and even
genetic background.
"I
think the challenge inherent in campaigns is that there are lots of
characteristics going on simultaneously," says Jeff Niederdeppe,
University of Wisconsin, who has published work with Farrelly on the success of
anti-smoking campaigns. "In the real world, it's hard to isolate exactly
what it is that makes an ad effective."
Nevertheless,
over the last three decades research has provided data that help map the path
to a successful message. Add to this traditional research the newfound
potential for personalization via the Web, cell phones, and virtual worlds -
and the science of persuasion is poised for a leap in innovation.
Routes to
Success
One theory forms the backbone of most persuasion studies. The elaboration likelihood model
outlined by Richard Petty and John Cacioppo in 1986 proposes two routes a
message can take in terms of changing a person's attitude and behavior. One is
the central route, which requires careful scrutiny of an argument presented in
a message and appeals to people who enjoy thinking through the logic of
statements. If the message is presented by a credible source and forms a strong
logical argument, then persuasion will be likely according to the model. The
other option is the peripheral route, which relies less on critical thinking
and more on the overall feeling one gets from the message. Is the character in
the message likeable? Is there a catchy slogan? Is the presentation of the
message just plain cool?
Consider
the "Body Bags" ad against the backdrop of the elaboration likelihood
model. The ad's intense graphic images and quick sound bites, with no puzzle to
think through, most likely take a peripheral route in grabbing the attention of
teens.
The
Philip Morris tagline, "Think. Don't smoke," cries out for rational
thought, and so appeals to the central route of persuasion. But this central
route might not be enjoyable for a 13-year-old who hasn't yet mastered
self-analysis. How many parents have asked a child what were he or she was
thinking when the child did something wrong (like say, take the car without
permission) and in response got a shrug of the shoulders and: "Uh, I don't
know …it just happened."
If
Philip Morris had focused on what teens could gain from not smoking maybe the
ad campaign would have made headway. One of the most definitive theories in
framing health messages comes from the work of Salovey and Alex Rothman,
University of Minnesota. They completed numerous studies in the late 1990s
confirming the effectiveness of what they call gain- or loss-framed messages.
According to their research, if you want to persuade someone to take on a
preventative behavior, like condom use, then the most effective message will be
one that highlights the benefits of using condoms. But if you want to convince
someone to engage in the detection of a disease or other illness, like an HIV
test, then the best message is one that focuses on the negatives or loss
involved in not getting tested.
"It's
all about an interaction between the framing of a message and the perceived
risk involved in a behavior," says Salovey. "The frame is conditional
on the situation, and rarely is only one single variable involved."
A
bit of background sheds light on how this works. Salovey and Rothman's work
grew out of a Nobel Prize-winning model of decision making called
"prospect theory," developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in
1979. The model shows that people are more likely to take risks when they are
given options in terms of losses, but less likely to take risks when they are
shown options in terms of gains. For instance, if people are forced to choose
between the following: a 50 percent chance they will lose $100 but a 100
percent chance they will lose $50, they tend to go with the first, more risky,
option. Conversely, if people are faced with a "gain frame" choice: a
50 percent chance they will win $100 or a 100 percent chance they will win $50,
they tend to go with the latter, less risky option. Basically, people tend to
take risks when there is something to lose, but tend not to take risks when
there is something to gain.
Nearly
all health communication can be framed either as a gain or a loss, say Salovey
and Rothman. They, along with fellow researchers in a variety of studies, have
shown success with this model in changing health behaviors, from wearing
sunscreen to getting a mammogram. Wearing sunscreen is a preventative measure
and so is generally considered low risk, because there is a certain outcome: sunscreen
will protect you from the sun's harmful rays. So the message should be pitched
around the benefit (i.e., the gain). Going for a mammogram, or any detection
test for that matter, is considered high risk because it is inherently
uncertain: a mammogram might reveal a deadly tumor. A message to persuade
people to take a mammogram (i.e., expose themselves to psychological risk)
should emphasize the risk of very serious loss from failing to take one. This
pattern, along with the prospect theory of how people deal with risk, provides
a guideline for message framing.
"The
interesting thing is that everyone has a knee jerk reaction to what they think
will work for a persuasive message," says Salovey. "But their
intuitions are usually not right."
Whether
one sees the behavior as low risk (sunscreen) or high risk (mammogram) will
dictate what kind of message, either loss-framed or gain-framed, should be
used. A recent study by A.M. Apanovitch,who now works in the commercial
industry, published in Health Psychology, illustrates the point. They
gave nearly 500 women two kinds of messages to persuade them to get tested for
HIV. One message framed HIV testing as a positive thing, something that would
bring peace of mind. The other message framed HIV testing in more negative
terms, stating if they did not get tested, bad things would result, (i.e., they
might be spreading the virus or not getting the care they need). For those
women who viewed HIV as a low risk, with a fairly certain outcome, the more
positively framed message was more effective. For those women who saw HIV
testing as uncertain and high risk, the negatively framed message was more
effective.
The
challenge for the real world of course, is to accurately know how people view a
behavior. A person who regularly flosses could see a dental visit as something
routine and preventative, nothing to really worry about. But someone delinquent
in flossing could see the same visit as terrifying, because of the risk of
finding plaque and cavities.
"We
need to know what's motivating their behavior," says Beth Meyerowitz,
professor of psychology and preventative medicine, University of Southern
California, who published numerous papers on loss/gain framing in the late
1980s. "It's complex. There are a lot of variability and individual
differences in terms of the recipients of the message."
It
is precisely this kind of variability that has led experts in communication and
social psychology to start thinking more about the difference between
"targeting" large groups versus "tailoring" to specific
individuals. Targeting messages involves segmenting people into homogenous
groups and then developing a message that speaks to that group. Tailoring, on
the other hand, requires an assessment of an individual's characteristics, and
then creating a specific message solely suited to that person.
"Traditionally
in health education and health psychology everyone used targeting," says
Seth Noar, University of Kentucky. "Then tailoring emerged in the 1980s,
and the literature exploded during the 1990s when James Prochaska came out with
the big concept of 'state of change.' He changed the paradigm."
Prochaska
developed a state model to describe behavior change, and showed that if we want
to influence someone's behavior we have to look at what state of change a
person is in, and how motivated they are to change in the first place.
Constructing unique messages that relate to an individual's behavior pattern
would seem the best way to solve the problem of variability along the continuum
of change. Just like tailored suits far surpass the mass-market designs from
department stores, a message that's made just for you ought to be of such
impressive quality the results are successful and lasting.
But
so far in the academic world, there is debate on whether targeting or tailoring
is best for persuasive messaging. "There is evidence that tailoring works,
at least a little bit better than targeting, but the evaluations have mostly
been between tailored messaging and nothing, not tailored messages and targeted
messages," says Noar who recently completed a review of over 60 studies on
mass media campaigns, published in the Journal of Health Communication.
"The question remains: Is that little bit of improvement worth all the
trouble and cost of getting the assessment of the individual, and then
tailoring individual messages to match that assessment?"
It's
possible that the exponential growth of computer power may soon help make this
debate obsolete. Increasingly extensive databases and complicated algorithms
could take care of the cost and time worries involved in the current tailored
campaigns. Already in the commercial world, the personalized recommendations
one finds on Amazon.com or Netflix are classic examples of successful
tailoring.
In
the academic realm, recent persuasion studies are starting to harness the power
of the Web. Deborah Tate, University of North Carolina, published work this
year in the Archives of Internal Medicine, that pitched Web-based,
computer-tailored messaging against general messaging. The goal was to get an
obese population to lose weight, and the results were striking. Messages
tailored to individuals led to significantly more weight loss than those
targeted to a group (in Tate's study messaging was delivered through the
SlimFast Web site).
The
computer-tailored messages, which were created via a database, were based on
the person's stage of weight loss, motivation, exercise schedule, etc. Tate
further showed that in the first three months, these tailored messages, sent
via email, were as effective as human counselors, who needless to say, provide
the highest form of tailored messaging one could receive. Slowly though, over a
six-month period, the human counselors won out over the computer-based
messages.
"With
the same behavior pattern there was a chance of receiving a repeated message
from the computer," says Tate. "We need to understand more about the
variables and then broaden the library [database]."
To
receive repeated messages might lessen the impact of "tailoring,"
since the message is no longer perceived by an individual as specific to them.
Digital You
And there are also those on the absolute edge of technology's limits who are
producing some mind-boggling results in persuasion. Imagine a future where a
digital you is persuading the real you; where a communicating clone could
become a new advertising medium. The words of the late media sage Marshall
McLuhan, could not ring more prophetic: it seems the medium has, literally,
become the message.
Consider
the work coming out of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Jeremy
Bailenson is working there on how framing a message using an "avatar"
or digital representation of ourselves, can have a profound influence on our
decisions and behavior. This work is premised on the long-held view that we
tend to be influenced by those who are similar to us in looks, values,
education, even tone of voice. "It's the old idea that people love
themselves," says Bailenson.
Before
the last presidential election in 2004, Bailenson and his colleagues sent out
digital photographs of George Bush and John Kerry to 200 voters. But a third of
the subjects received photographs that had features of their own face digitally
morphed onto Bush's face so subtly it could not consciously be detected.
Another third of the subjects received photographs that had their face morphed
onto Kerry, again below the level of conscious awareness. The last third simply
received unaltered photographs of both Bush and Kerry. Then a week before the
election, they asked the subjects to vote. The subjects who were previously
undecided were significantly more likely to vote for the candidate whose face
had been morphed to resemble theirs.
"Capitalizing
on human beings' disposition to prefer faces similar to their own, we
manipulated the outcome of the presidential election by a double digit
margin," writes Bailenson in the July/August 2006 issue of Science
& Spirit. "In a world where people are digital - photos, videos,
streaming audio - the ability to capture or manipulate a person's identity has
arrived."
Jesse
Fox, currently one of Bailenson's graduate students, is studying the persuasive
effects of digital clones. For instance, Fox creates a digital clone of a
person, and then has the person watch a video clip of the clone doing things
s/he's never done before, like bungee jumping or public speaking. The thinking
is that watching ourselves do things we've never done might just influence us
to start doing them in real life.
"This
is based on the notion that when we imagine doing something, it becomes more
feasible in our minds that we have already done it, or that we will do it in
the future," says Bailenson.